Red Cell

by Mark Henshaw

  The officer gave her the signal to proceed, a lazy military wave. Kyra withdrew her arm, rolled up the window, and turned the heater on full so the cab would recover the warm air it had hemorrhaged to the outside.

  Please let the barricades go off, she thought, and she was surprised at how much she meant it. The pneumatic rams had enough power to snap the truck’s frame in half, if not flip the vehicle onto its cab on the frozen asphalt. But the thought of a sure trip to the hospital didn’t seem any worse to her than where she was going at the moment.

  Her Ranger rolled over the closed hydraulic gates, the barricades didn’t rise up from the road underneath, and Kyra sighed, not in relief, she realized, but in slight frustration. She hadn’t been to headquarters in six months. She shouldn’t have been returning for at least six more, but that plan had jumped the rails and nobody was happy about it. Her visit today wasn’t by choice, hers or anyone else’s, and it galled her to think that she would have to make the same trip every day going forward. Maybe the new assignment would be short. Working at headquarters was not one of her ambitions.

  She passed the front of the Old Headquarters Building (OHB), which offered the view most familiar to those who had only seen the facility on the news. She was taking the long way around but she was in no hurry. The George Washington Parkway entrance was ahead and it would have been easy to turn right, leave the compound, and go home. She turned left after sitting at the stop sign for ten full seconds. There were no other cars on the road.

  There’s my girl.

  The A-12 Oxcart loomed over the roadway, sitting at a rolled angle, nose up on three steel pylons, and Kyra smiled for the first time that morning. She loved the plane. She’d never earned that pilot’s license despite her childhood ambitions—her parents had never been willing to spend the money—and had been reduced to reading about planes and spending hours in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and its annex at Dulles Airport. On her first visit to the Agency compound, she’d climbed the concrete facade surrounding the Oxcart and touched the cold, black wing. It had been the most spiritual experience she had enjoyed in her twenty-five years. Kyra still wondered what it would be like to fly Kelly Johnson’s masterpiece at ninety thousand feet, setting the air on fire at Mach 3.

  The plane passed behind her and the diversion came to a rude end.

  Those with more leave hours to burn, which looked to be almost everyone, had left the parking garage nearly empty. Kyra pulled into a space on the bottom level near the front, killed the engine, and debated starting it again and driving away.

  Just do it. Or you’ll have to come back and do it just like this tomorrow.

  She abandoned the truck before she could talk herself out of it.

  The wind brushed up snow from the drifts piled on the grounds and threw it across her path. She hadn’t bothered with a hat or gloves and instead thrust her hands into her coat pockets. There was no help for her face. Her cheeks and ears, numb when she reached the glass doors to the New Headquarters Building, tingled painfully as she passed through the heated air curtain. A shot of Scotch would have warmed her stomach faster than coffee, and for a second she wished for a hip flask of anything strong. The urge died quickly. Meeting with the CIA director while smelling of alcohol before lunch would kill whatever career she still had left.

  The lobby was a cathedral in miniature, unlit, thirty yards long, and flanked on both sides by dark gray marble pillars that framed bronze sculptures and modular gray vinyl couches along the walls. The grayish-blue carpet, brightened only by the CIA seal in the center, matched the odd gloom that was unusual for the normally bright space. Kyra looked up and saw snow covering the semicircular glass ceiling. It blocked out the sun and washed out the colors in a drab, filtered light. The entrance was abandoned except for a security protective officer manning the guard desk at the lobby’s far end. His reading lamp created a small bubble of warm light in the darkness.

  She walked the length of the room, ran her badge over the security turnstiles, and entered her code. The restraining arms parted and the SPO didn’t look up. Kyra walked around the guard desk to the escalator leading to the lower floors. The windows beyond ran floor to ceiling and Kyra could see the empty courtyard below and the massive Old Headquarters Building a few hundred feet beyond. The dark and quiet combined to make the compound feel deserted, which was an unearthly feeling given the size of the OHB filling the bay windows. The Agency complex covered three hundred acres cut out of the George Washington National Forest along the GW Parkway, barely a stone’s throw from the Potomac. Kyra couldn’t guess from the view how many people worked there. The exact number was classified anyway, and the building’s size made her realize how important she was to the place.

  Not at all. A cog in the machine.

  The desire to reverse course welled up in her throat again. She beat it down without mercy, never breaking stride, and the craving for a drink surged up to replace it.

  The walk to her destination took a long three minutes. The Office of Medical Services lobby on the first floor looked like any doctor’s office, which had surprised her the first time she visited. It was a medical facility like any private practice in the outside world, but it seemed out of place in a government building. More so, Kyra thought, given that it was wedged in between the Agency museum and the Old Headquarters lobby.

  Kyra signed in. After a short wait, the desk nurse escorted her back to an examination room. Kyra took the usual place on the exam table and the nurse didn’t bother to assure her that someone would be in to see her in a few minutes.

  The doctor was an old man, she noted, gray hair and his share of weathered skin, though Kyra suspected he’d been a handsome man when he was younger. He said nothing as he studied her chart, and Kyra took the time to study him. She’d been here, just after Caracas, and talked with another doctor about his job. It was relatively simple, with most duties consisting of performing physicals and dispensing vaccinations to clear staff officers to travel overseas. The doctors were usually busiest at Christmas when they had to dole out the free flu shots to all comers. But every so often analysts would call for a consult about theoretical patients they wouldn’t identify despite the doctors’ own TS/SCI security clearances. They were trying to determine when some particularly unpopular foreign leader was going to drop dead, Kyra supposed, which made for a nice puzzle with no patient to examine.

  And sometimes they got to treat patients, like Kyra, with wounds or diseases contracted in places they couldn’t always tell him they’d been. She was sure that broke up the monotony.

  “Still sore?” the doctor finally asked. He closed up the chart and set it on the nearby counter.

  “Yes,” Kyra admitted. “It’s stiff mostly. Makes driving a little more complicated.”

  “You drive an automatic or a stick?”

  “An automatic,” Kyra said, and she was grateful for it. Driving a stick shift would’ve been torture in Beltway traffic, which was stop-and-go most of the time. “I usually don’t feel it until I have to make a hard turn or mess with the radio.”

  “You probably still have some residual deep tissue bruising,” the doctor said. “You lost some triceps and brachialis, and there’s scarring across the site and down into the muscle. Scar tissue isn’t real pliable, so you’re going to suffer some loss of flexibility. Not too much, I think, but you’ll notice it. Right- or left-handed?”

  “Left.”

  “That’s good news. It won’t affect your primary arm,” the doctor told her. Kyra was sure it was an attempt to comfort her, but it struck her as weak. “Okay. Let’s have a look.”

  Kyra unbuttoned her shirt and pulled her right arm out of the sleeve, exposing a large, thick medical bandage taped on all four sides across the back of her right upper arm. The doctor pulled the cover back, gently separating the tape from her skin until the gauze came away. She had a lateral laceration running almost three inches across her triceps. The once-ragged edges of the torn skin had bee
n trimmed neat by a surgeon’s scalpel and pulled together, and they were still held by two dozen tight stitches.

  The doctor stared at the wound, turning her arm slightly from side to side as he studied the wound. “It looks good,” he finally said. “No signs of infection. I think the stitches can come out whenever you want, but keep it covered for another couple of weeks to be safe.” Kyra nodded, put her arm back inside her shirt, and pulled it down over her waist. “How’s the Vicodin working for you?” he asked.

  “Pretty good, I guess,” Kyra said. “It lets me sleep. Still hurts sometimes, though. Like deep, in the bone.”

  “I’m not surprised,” the doctor replied. “It’s probably the bruising. The fracture in the humerus should be healed by now. And if it gets too bad, we can go up on the Vicodin. Do you need a refill?”

  “Sure,” Kyra said, without enthusiasm.

  “I’ll write one up.” He caught the depression in her voice. She hadn’t tried to hide it. “You were lucky,” he offered. “You could’ve lost that arm.”

  “I don’t feel lucky,” Kyra told him. She finished straightening her shirt and pushed herself off the exam table onto the floor.

  “Getting shot will do that, I guess,” he conceded.

  Kyra finished rolling up her sleeve as the doctor left the room. One appointment finished. She was far more worried about the second.

  Kathryn Cooke’s first visit to the Oval Office had been her own inauguration as CIA director. That summer day, the president of the United States had spent two minutes, carefully timed by the White House chief of staff, on small talk and a tour of the room. The national security advisor had administered the oath of office while the White House photographer recorded the event. The White House press corps had been admitted to hear the president deliver a statement of confidence in the job she would do. Cooke made her own brief statement—she’d worked for six hours, revised it a dozen times, and memorized it—expressing the usual gratitude. Five minutes were granted for six questions before the president excused the press corps. Cooke was allowed thirty seconds of small talk and then was politely dismissed. Her few return visits had mostly been social affairs. The job of CIA director was not what it once had been. For fifty-nine years, her predecessors had both run the CIA and managed the intelligence community, as much as it could be managed. But the Agency had suffered too many failures, an angry Congress had created a new office to take over the latter job, and so Cooke answered to the director of national intelligence. The DNI, Michael Rhead, was now the president’s intel advisor, and that left little reason for the commander in chief to ever summon the head of the Central Intelligence Agency to the White House.

  Cooke had never dwelled on the job’s new limitations. It was a higher post than she’d ever expected to hold and she was still an agency director with the usual perquisites—a basement of security personnel and secure communications gear, an armored Chevrolet SUV with a driver, and a chase car of armed guards. She would have preferred to drive her BMW but conceded that the escort gave her time to read instead of fighting perpetually clogged Beltway lanes.

  It was a true blessing this morning. The Ops Center call came after three hours of sleep. Coffee, a shower that wasn’t as hot as she preferred, and old Navy discipline brought her online. The senior duty officer had sent the raw SIGINT to her secure fax, and a scan of the pages over blueberry yogurt and granola put her in full motion. It had then been her unpleasant task to notify the DNI and the national security advisor. The former had a demeanor that always made phone calls an irritating duty regardless of the hour. The latter took the early call like the gracious gentleman that he was.

  The cold Virginia morning chased away the last vestiges of sleepiness as she walked to the armored car. A security officer ran the President’s Daily Brief article to the vehicle as she was climbing into the back seat.

  For the President

  February 2

  * * *

  In the Last Few Hours . . .

  Arrests in Taipei Threaten Cross-Strait Status Quo

  Taiwan’s arrest of eight Chinese nationals—at least three of whom are PRC Ministry of State Security (MSS) intelligence officers—could sow confusion among the PRC leadership about Taiwanese President Liang’s intentions and lead to a confrontation over the “One China” policy. We have no information on how Taiwan’s National Security Bureau (NSB) identified the MSS officers or who issued the orders to arrest them.

  • The arrests could damage the MSS espionage infrastructure in Taipei in the short term, but the MSS almost certainly has other MSS officers in place who will redeploy to maintain or reconstitute asset networks affected by the arrests.

  It is unlikely that Taiwan’s NSB would have executed the counterintelligence operation without Liang’s knowledge and approval. Tian almost certainly will consider Liang personally responsible for the operation and will demand the release of the detainees.

  • Liang likely will resist giving up the detainees without diplomatic concessions from the PRC to avoid appearing even weaker before the March general election.

  • Tian likely will offer no concessions given the “One China” position that Taiwan is not a sovereign equal of the PRC.

  The arrests could disrupt MSS access to highly placed human sources from which PRC President Tian Kal draws insight into Liang’s foreign policy intentions. Tian often relies on MSS reports to settle Politburo debates over diplomatic, economic, and military responses to Liang’s frequent nationalist rhetoric.

  This article was prepared by CIA with reporting from CIA and NSA.

  Cooke’s driver pulled the armored car into the executive garage under the Old Headquarters Building a minute after passing through the George Washington Parkway gate. The garage had its own guard post manned by SPOs to keep out the masses. Cooke didn’t care for the elitism. Many employees had to walk a good quarter mile from the parking lot’s outer limits, but she bowed to the fact that, most days, parking spaces and time on her schedule were too limited.

  The cold erased her guilt that this garage had a private elevator that ran to her office. The doors opened onto the Old Headquarters Building seventh floor, where Clark Barron, the director of the National Clandestine Service, stood waiting for her with a cup of hot coffee in hand. Cooke wondered how the man had ever blended into a crowd during his younger days as a case officer. The CIA director was not a short woman, a few inches shy of six feet, and she still strained to look up at the man’s face.

  “God bless you, Clark,” Cooke said. She traded her coat for the mug and drained half the coffee in a single swig.

  “I thought you were agnostic,” Barron said.

  “Just shows how grateful I am,” Cooke said. “And this is good brew. How did you know how I like it?”

  “I recruited your assistant,” Barron said. “She’s my most valuable asset now. I’ve been thinking about assigning her a code-name crypt.”

  “Scoundrel.”

  “It’s what case officers do,” Barron reminded her. “Even the old ones.”

  “And you do it well. Whatever you want, it’s yours,” Cooke promised.

  “No ulterior motives this time. I knew you were coming and chivalry is dead in this town, so I’m left to play the gentleman,” Barron said.

  The CIA director’s “office” actually was a complex. The door to Cooke’s private workspace sat back along the rear wall of the larger area. Her office windows opened to a view of the George Washington National Forest. Her desk sat to the immediate left of the door and she was religious about keeping it clear, mostly out of fear that once the paperwork started to pile up she would never get ahead of it. The walls were home to curiosities under glass, the number evenly split between gifts from foreign peers and trophies smuggled out of countries by case officers. A US flag covered the western wall, shabby and torn, with burns and scorches over its surface. A CIA officer had recovered it from the smoking crater of the World Trade Center and no Agency director would ever rem
ove it. The September 11 flag was the lone permanent artifact in an office that changed occupants and mementos more often than the Oval Office changed presidents.

  Barron followed Cooke into the office and closed the door behind her. “The National Weather Service says we’ve got two days before the temperature climbs up into the teens and more snow inbound from a nor’easter. We should just catch the edge of it, but still,” he said. “A shame we can’t close the place down and send everyone home.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s not snowing in Taipei,” Cooke observed.

  “Or Beijing,” Barron said. “I renew my request for a CIA Southern Command in Miami.”

  “Denied,” Cooke said. “Again.”

  “I have allergies to snow, I swear.”

  “I grew up in Maine. I have no sympathy for you,” Cooke said. “Didn’t you do a rotation in Moscow?”

  “Two actually. Three years as a case officer, four as station chief,” Barron said. “And I grew up in Chicago. You can see why I’m looking to spend my remaining years in the sun.” The promotion path to Barron’s office historically ran through Moscow. Even during the War on Terror, getting that ticket punched without being declared persona non grata by the Russian government never hurt a case officer’s career.